James R. Mirick sets the record straight on things he cares about

Computer Pioneer John Backus Gets Reset for the Last Time

I note sadly and with reverence that John Backus, one of the greatest of the pioneers of the computer technology world, has passed away at the age of 82. He was the manager of the IBM project team that invented the FORTRAN programming language in the early 1950s.

For the non-technological of you, let me put him into context. Before him, if you wanted to write a program for a computer, you wrote commands that reflected the underlying circuit structure of the computer: retrieve a value of a certain length from a particular location in core memory and place it in some register, fetch another value from another place in memory and add it to the register (checking for sign issues and possible overflows and handle them if they occur), and then store the result from the register to the first location in memory again.

After him, you said: A = A + 1 (increment the value of “A” by one).

In other words, by inventing the FORTRAN language, he created a way to harness the computer by writing programs in the language of problem, not in the language of the computer. This abstraction was a towering intellectual achievement that has seldom been outdone in any field. All computer languages since then are descended in a fashion from FORTRAN, and all are unquestionably possible only because of FORTRAN’s proving the concept that such a thing could be done at all.

My first programming language was FORTRAN, on an IBM 1620. I programming in FORTRAN in graduate school, and I have even written FORTRAN compilers (the programs that read in the FORTRAN statements and create a machine-executable program from them). So at it’s most fundamental level, FORTRAN is at the foundation of my career.

In graduate school at the University of Hawaii, one of my professors in the Engineering Department stated, “you don’t learn much from a bridge that stands,” and I have held that thought in my pocket all my career. John Backus said a similar thing, which also sustains me at appropriate times:

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”